Is UI Bakery right for my use case?

Help & Support đź’»
1

Hi all,
I am just wondering if UI Bakery is the right tool for my SaaS solution.
My background is in data & analytics, mainly using BI tools like Qlik & Power BI, with various SQL based ETL tasks.

Over the years, I have found that users don’t use dashboards all that much, they tend to use the dashboards as data pumps for Excel. They filter and sort the data in the dashboard and then export to Excel.
Once in Excel, they add some custom calculations. For example, on a sales dashboard, users will add comments around deals or best/worst case scenarios.

The other thing that I see quite often, is that within many companies, there are multiple systems and we often have links to these systems. Being able to update (write back) to each system is helpful. There’s actually a video released by ReTool which explains why they have moved away from Power BI to dashboards within ReTool.

The applications which we are planning to build are data first - UI second. Which means that the UI can vary per customer - the ideal use case for UI Bakery!
BUT - the issue is that we need to be able to deal with large volumes of data, just like a BI tool.
AG-Grid can handle larger volumes, so adding AG-Grid as a custom component, might work.
The backend we are planning to use is a Postgres based column database like Clickhouse or Motherduck (not really Postgres)
There’s another tool, which is .NET based, called Nreco which is a pivot data micro service. This tool does in-memory data compression and server side pagination and summation, which is required for large volumes of data.

I am thinking that I might need to integrate both of these components in different screens, for different reasons. One is more for data prep, reading directly from the data warehouse, then AG-Grid is for end user reporting analysis.

Am I looking at the wrong tool?

For context, I run an IT consulting business and employ a team of .NET / JS / SQL developers, so building everything from scratch is certainly possible and what the team wants to do!

Thanks in advance :slight_smile:

2

Hi there!

UI Bakery is actually designed for exactly this kind of “data-first, UI-second” approach. It’s not only about displaying dashboards, but also about managing data: showing, editing, and writing back to multiple systems in one place.

A couple of thoughts for your scenario:

  • AI-generated apps in UI Bakery are a great fit when you have complex requirements (large datasets, many custom charts, multiple data sources). Instead of manually dragging components, you can describe what you want and let AI scaffold the screens and logic, then fine-tune as needed.
  • If you prefer the drag-and-drop approach, you can still bring in AG-Grid as a custom component, or simply rely on UI Bakery’s built-in table with server-side pagination (so you don’t need to load everything at once).
  • Regarding integration with your backend tools (like NReco or others), as long as there’s an API, UI Bakery can connect to it and combine the data with your warehouse or other services. As I see NReco has GraphQL API, so it should be easy to connect it to UI Bakery.

So no, you’re not looking at the wrong tool :slightly_smiling_face: In fact, it sounds like a perfect fit for what you want to achieve!

1 Like